£10 Nursery Material - Juniperus Scopulorum (Rocky Mountain Juniper)

I love Junipers. I love the way the pads look, the bark textures, the techniques for developing foliage filled areas and the flexibility of the branches for styling. I love the myriad styles and images you can create with these incredibly versatile trees. In fact, if I think of Bonsai, Juniper is probably one of the first varieties I think of.

I wanted to hone my development skills and create something purely from young nursery material, so I hunted around my local nursery for something suitable.

What attracted me to this, was it's great bark and potential for a literati style due to it's long sweeping trunk

It looked very sorry for itself, having been left laying on it's side but it had a fairly even spread of branches around the trunk all the way up to it's considerably tall apex and at £9.99 I couldn't resist taking it on.

As I bought it mid year, I couldn't really do much in the way of potting but due to it having shifted in the pot it needed stabilising while I worked out an initial image to build from. Check out my engineering skills with a ball of string here.... *chortle*

Problems arose, it kept falling over... so I had to at least slip pot it into something with decent drainage to ensure it stayed upright. I bought myself a pond basket and filled it with Low Dust Tesco Cat Litter, ensuring the rootball was completely intact and that no soil was removed.

I placed it in the shade for 6 weeks to ensure it was ok, and misted the foliage now and again during the fierce heat of the summer. Once it had settled I then took to working out the final height and removing some bar branches, and setting all of the branches left in a downward style. This would be some way off from the final image, and much of the foliage is at the end of the branches, so my primary goal will be to prune back vigorous shoots to promote back budding.

The apex was jinned and the very top branch forced up. Eventually I will train the shoots into new pads, to disguise but this will take many years. I was concerned that this was a step too far, removing so much material above this site and removing so many branches,  but this is precisely why I bought it - to refine my techniques and find the boundaries of what these trees will take and still remain healthy


My end aim is to have as little as 25% of the existing branches left on the tree, chasing back the foliage close to the trunk, but for now I think I've done more than enough to give this little tree a shock this year and will leave it for the next year to grow out, just keeping a check on the juvenile foliage. There is no real sign of the final image yet, I will see where back budding is most prolific and work it from what the tree tells me over the next few seasons

Pleasingly it is back budding all over, on many of the branches, including the apical leader so I hope it will get thorugh to next year. You can see the lighter shade of juvenile foliage - all of the vertically growing foliage is new this year, so it's alive it would seem....

Yessss...IT'S ALIIIVE!
 
 
 

 

 Unfortunately due to the wet autumn recently, the buttress is showing signs of (rot?) something nasty... so I created a simple rain cover from polystyrene so that I can control the amount of water entering the substrate. I REALLY want to repot this tree as it seems to be waterlogging...

 Any ideas on taking a shot at another repot after so much work/slip potting would be great as I'm of the view that this could be terminal...

Thanks for reading

DJ